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I bought a doll bed for my daughter from Ikea. The bedding which came with it was functional but not very inspiring and didn’t go with the colour scheme in her room (the bedding was blue) so I decided to make a mini quilt.

This was definitely a Missouri Star Quilt Company tutorial.

The photo is awful but you can just about make out my dreadful first attempt at free motion quilting…

Because my daughter is now at the age where she would not leave presents alone if they were under the tree, we had to hide them all. I got sick of looking at bare carpet underneath the tree so decided to make a dresden plate quilted tree skirt with some Christmas fat quarters I’d bought.

I think I saw something like this on one of the Missouri Star Quilt Company tutorials. I do love Jenny’s tutorials.

This didn’t take long to make and I was really pleased with the results although I do think it should have been a bit bigger perhaps.

This time no interlining apart from a bit of firm interlining as a bit of a base. I made this for the quilt friend who never seemed to have a bag on her when we went shopping (which everyone in the UK knows is a must these days).

This is a reversible tote. I also added a button on each side just because I’d bought a new sewing machine and it did one-step buttonholes which I wanted to try out.

I do love these fabrics.

Incidentally, my friend still never has a bag on her when we go shopping…

After completing the mega quilt (!) I felt a bit bereft without a project in mind. Although I don’t really have an interest in sewing clothes, I thought I would have a go – just so I could say I tried it. I tried to make a tunic top for my daughter.

I didn’t enjoy this process – mainly the overcasting around curved edges (how do you do that?!) And unfortunately I used one of her t-shirts as a template so, of course, the arms were too slim for the fabric. She wore it once and then it started to come apart at the arm seams.

This time I wanted to do something a bit simpler. I had quite a few fabrics that I had hoarded from ebay so I set about making a baby quilt. This was mainly 5″ squares with a large border. It measures approximately … .This isn’t yet finished because I decided to redo the binding. It’s nearly finished but I haven’t sat down to finish the binding yet.

I keep thinking about it though. When it’s finished it will be for sale so check out my shop. Photo to come soon…

After talking to a friend about my new found love of sewing and making quilts (okay just two so far) she said she’d always wanted one and would I make her one for her bed. The only snag – she has a super king size bed (6 foot wide).

Well the name of my blog says it all – I’m just Sew Ambitious, I couldn’t turn down this scale of challenge! I found a pattern I thought would be fairly straight forward to make on the Accuquilt site.

There were several challenges with this quilt:

Finding various fabrics which were the right colour for the quilt

Finding space to work out which blocks would go where – I wanted to ensure that no blocks were repeated in each row. See photo below for how I did this!

Sheer size of the quilt! Basting it was epic and I ran out of pins twice! I think I now have 300 pins for basting.

Quilting it. The size of the quilt was quite daunting and I really am no good at free motion quilting so I opted to quilt in diagonal lines across the quilt. This was actually quite effective.

I also didn’t have enough backing fabric so had to improvise. The back of the quilt ended up a bit of a happy accident.

The photo above shows the finished quilt on my friend’s bed. She is very happy with it.

My mum told me about a quilting tutorial on youtube by Melanie Ham. My mum doesn’t sew but she said if she did, she would have a go at making a quilt.

So I watched a few tutorials and bought a couple of books. Then I splashed out on a jelly roll which took me a while to track down because it was issued 2 years previously – Moda Fabric by Bonnie and Camille ‘Miss Kate’. It was going to be a quilt for Kate’s room so I seemed only right that I had that fabric. I really enjoyed sewing the lengths of fabric together. What I didn’t enjoy was all the cutting! Oh and trying to put together the different fabrics and spacing them out well! As you will see, most of the fabrics are light apart from a navy blue and I did kind of end up with a lot of them at one end. I did find this part of the process very difficult.

I also sewed the binding on quite badly. With a machine. It was my first attempt at binding. Now I understand that it’s actually quite therapeutic to finish the binding by hand.